Camaleón <noela...@gmail.com> writes: > On Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:28:55 +0000, lee wrote: > >> Camaleón <noela...@gmail.com> writes: >> >>> having to deal with the mess of installing a VGA card in linux. It >>> never has been so difficult and so hard than now is (or at least I >>> don't remember it was when no KMS and no dynamic Xorg existed). >> >> Hum, did you ever try to get X11 to work with an ATI mach32 or mach64 >> or, later, a Matrox G200, about 15 years ago? > > My first linux box (SuSE Linux 8.2) was installed on a Matrox G450, IIRC. > I had to do nothing, it worked out of the box. Maybe I was just lucky. > > Afterwards, I have installed over nvidia (mostly in workstations), ATI > (in servers) and Intel (netbooks).
You must have been really lucky then :) >> Remember your huge 14 or 15" CRT monitor flickering and possibly being >> damaged when you got the frequencies too high in your xf86config while >> trying to get a less flickery image in an unbelieveably high 1024x768 >> resolution? > > Nope, maybe because my displays were well supported (Sony) :-) > >> And remember trying to figure out modelines? > > Nope, in fact I've only had to deal with that at the time Xorg became > dynamic but not before (openSUSE had a very nice tool to configure this > called "SaX"). Yeah, there were some tools to calculate modelines ... Fortunately, I got away with specifying the frequencies. >> Nowadays, you don´t really need to do anything ... > > No? Nothing? Really? I mean, really? You are very likely to end up with a graphical display because all the drivers are (needlessly) installed through dependencies, and which one is used is being figured out automatically. That doesn´t mean that your display is optimally configured. > You do have to do many things now that were not needed in the old days. > For instance, try to install the closed source nvidia driver while having > nuvó installed. Just put nuveau into /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist. > In the old times, editing one line at xorg.conf was all > to get the driver loaded. In many cases, things work without xorg.conf. > Now you can be even forced to uninstall one set of the drivers to use > the other. And debugging has turned very difficult... If you have had several different drivers for the same card 15 years ago, you´d probably have had the same problem. >> What hasn´t changed is that ATI cards (now made by AMD) cause nothing >> but trouble ... > > Well, "radeon" driver should be by now the best open source VGA driver > out there, it's almost open source and developers have been working on it > since many years... ATI cards have been troublesome with OS/2 2.0 and 3.0, with various versions of Windoze and with Linux. I have a Radeon card in this laptop, and when I switch over to that card with vgaswitcheroo, I don´t get any further screen output until I switch back to the Intel card. The open source driver for them might be great, it just doesn´t help me when there´s no screen output. If I could have bought this laptop with an NVDIA card, I would have. All the NVDIA cards I´ve had just worked fine, and all the ATI cards I´ve had and have seen were troublesome. >> Stayvoid, you can use vgaswitcheroo to switch between cards. You need to >> have the debugfs mounted for that. If you still get screen output after >> switching over, you´re lucky --- I´m not and so I´m stuck with the slow >> Intel card. > > Intel is another good choice if you don't want many problems and are > happy with a low-end 3D card. The Intel card is ok unless I want to play a game. For games, it´s an euphemism to say that the performance is pathetic. >> Unfortunately, the free NVIDA drivers are rather useless when you want >> to play games. You can install the non-free ones from the Debian >> packages. > > I've always been lucky with nvidia closed drivers. I don't like the fact > they are closed but at least I get a stable system with few glitches. Yeah, that´s why I keep buying NVDIA cards: they work. Now I didn´t have a choice but to get an ATI card in this laptop, and of course, it doesn´t work ... -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/87vcnp0yzj....@songoku.yagibdah.de
